Last Day (25 page)

“Hmm,” Harris said.

“Is that a yes?” Reid asked.

“Uh, yes.” The professorial authority had gone from his voice.

“So why do you have Beth’s name at the top of that list?”

“No reason.”

“Those others are the names of the women you were convicted of sexually assaulting, right? Judith Lane, Alissa Fratelli, Gennifer Mornay . . .”

“It’s a coincidence,” he said.

“So, you sexually assaulted every woman on that list except Beth Lathrop?”

Harris nodded, looking miserable.

“We’ll come back to that in a minute,” Reid said. “I see that you’ve put these two men’s names at the top, and you’ve written them in bolder ink. Like you must have really pressed down, to make the names nice and strong. Read me the names, will you?”

Harris coughed. He looked away, then back at the postcard. “Martin and Pete,” he said finally.

“Martin and Pete,” Reid said. “Martin . . . that’s you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So what about Pete? Who’s he?”

“I guess it’s Pete Lathrop.”

“You guess? Or you know? Considering you wrote it.”

“I know,” he said. “It’s Pete Lathrop.”

“But I thought you said you don’t know him,” Reid said, watching for even a blink that might give him away.

“That’s true. I don’t.”

“Never met him?”

Harris shook his head.

“So what is Pete Lathrop’s name doing on this list you made of the women you assaulted?”

“Except Beth,” Harris interjected. “I did not assault her. We need to be clear on that.”

“Well, let’s say we are. Still, what is Pete’s name doing here?”

Martin Harris glanced at his lawyer. A little color had returned to his face, two pink patches on his round cheeks. His eyes were full of anxiety.

“I advise you not to answer,” Lewiston said.

“But otherwise he’ll think . . . ,” Harris whispered. “And it will be worse.”

Lewiston shrugged. “I’ve given you my advice.”

Harris seemed to make up his mind. He sat taller, folded his hands on the table in front of him.

“I wanted to help you solve the crime,” he said, staring into Reid’s eyes.

Reid tried not to show his disbelief.

“And how would you help me?” Reid asked.

“Unfortunately, from my past behavior, I know too much about people who do . . . things to women. Such as those that were done to Beth.”

Beth.
Reid controlled his breathing. He had been careful about what was reported in the case. The department had held back certain details of the crime scene, including the fact that lace impressions had been left by the force of strangulation.

“What things were done to her?” Reid asked.

The pink patches on Harris’s cheeks were turning red.
Temperature rising: he’s getting excited,
Reid thought.

“Horrible things. Rape things,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Being stripped. The strangling with hands. Hands all over her body, then around her neck.”

Reid watched Harris’s hands unconsciously flexing and unflexing, making an oval as if wrapping around a throat.

“Did you do these ‘rape things’?” Reid asked, chilled as he watched Harris’s hands tighten and release.

“Not to Beth.”

“Did you see someone else do them to Beth?”

He hesitated, started to say something, then changed his mind and shook his head.

“It seems to me like you did,” Reid said.

“Not really.”

“Not really? But sort of?”

He sighed. “I dreamed about it,” he said. “My treatment is working; it is, truly. But I can’t help what I dream.”

Truly.
“Of course you can’t,” Reid said. “So, what did you dream?”

“I saw Pete doing it to her,” Harris said. “She was on the bed. So beautiful and dainty, wearing her nightie. Pregnant. And how lovely a woman is at that time. There is a glow—I’ve seen it many times. My own wife . . .”

Did you want to strangle your own wife too?
Reid wondered, watching sweat break out on his forehead.

“Right. So you dreamed of Beth on her bed.”

“And Pete, her strong husband, standing over her, very serious.”

Wives are dainty and lovely; husbands are strong and serious,
Reid thought.

“What did Pete do?”

“Well, he hit her, of course. That’s what the bruises are from. And he did this,” Harris said, mimicking strangulation with his hands, consciously this time. “Then he would have taken her panties, which he would have removed after he hit her—I left that out—and then he would have wrapped it around her throat, and, well, you can imagine.”

Reid watched him in silence. During the course of most of Martin Harris’s sexual assaults, he did use ligatures. He would start to choke his victim, then stop just as she was about to pass out. He always wore a mask. He’d never strangled a woman to death; he had always stopped short.

“I really can’t imagine, Martin,” Reid said. “You need to tell me exactly what you’re talking about.”

“Well, after he wrapped her panties around her throat, he would pull them tight. And then, eventually, she would die.”

“That’s what you saw Pete do?”

“In my dream, not real life! Wasn’t I being clear?” Harris asked.

“Not entirely,” Reid said. “What did her panties look like?”

“Black. Lacy edge.” As he said the words, Harris tickled his own neck, then made a finger slash, as if cutting his throat. He shivered and tried to hold back a smile. “They matched her bra.”

Reid pictured the crime scene as if he were there right now. Beth on her side; that bruised lace-imprinted line around her neck; her black panties and bra, the French lace torn to shreds, lying on the floor.

No one who had not been in that room, or read the police reports, knew those details. Reid’s heart was slamming in his chest, and his mouth was dry.

“You were there,” Reid said.

“No! I told you. I just dreamed about it!”

Reid picked up the postcard and looked at the way Harris had written Pete’s name next to his own, almost like doodling the name of a crush. Reid knew that criminals, especially those with paraphilic disorders, loved to communicate with each other, relive their crimes and share fantasies.

“I’m really curious about why you wrote Pete’s name right next to yours. I know you say you dreamed about him, but to me it seems like more than that, Martin. To me it seems as if you and Pete did something together. Or maybe he told you about what
he
did.”

“Yes!” Harris said, looking almost triumphant, as if Reid finally got it. “That’s exactly it! In the dream he told me. He showed me! I saw it all! That’s what I mean by wanting to help you solve the crime. That’s why I put his name and Beth’s with the list of, you know.”

“The women you assaulted,” Reid said in a calm voice.

“Well, yes. Because even though I don’t do that anymore, have no desire whatsoever to do that again, I understand people who do. That’s why I dreamed of Pete. I don’t want to sound like I admire him—honestly, I don’t. But I can get right into his skin and feel how he hurt his wife and then killed her.”

Honestly.

“Let’s get a written statement on that,” Reid said.

“So you believe me?” Harris said.

Reid stared at him. He believed that Martin Harris had either killed Beth or spoken to the killer, who had given him very specific details. He saw the hopefulness in Harris’s eyes. Reid was happy to dash it.

“The problem, Martin, is that I don’t believe in dreams,” Reid said. And he left the interview room, the Black Hall postcard in his hand.

29

Her phone buzzed, and Kate glanced at the screen. It was Lulu, calling for the third time since Kate had left the soup kitchen. Scotty had obviously raised the alarm. Again, Kate let it go to voice mail. In the midday sun, she walked from downtown New London past Fort Trumbull to Pequot Avenue.

Nothing revealed a person’s character like the poetics of loss. Beth’s death had revealed the dark sides of people she’d loved and trusted. Kate had felt guilty for not telling Lulu about the sketch, but the way she and Scotty had known everything and kept Beth’s secret felt like a much worse betrayal. Even deeper than that, Beth herself had chosen to keep it from Kate.

When Kate got to Monte Cristo Cottage, the boyhood home of Eugene O’Neill, she slowed down. The Victorian house was up a slight rise from the street, and she sat on the wall along the sidewalk and faced the harbor. There was barely a breeze; two boats with sails futilely raised motored toward the Sound, looking for wind. She felt a presence behind her—not a person, but the cottage itself. O’Neill’s father had been an actor, the house named for his most famous role, the Count of Monte Cristo. It had been the setting for O’Neill’s play
Long Day’s Journey into Night
.

When Kate was a senior in high school, Mathilda had taken her and Beth to see the brilliant production in New York at the Plymouth
Theater, with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy starring as Mary and James Tyrone, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jamie, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund—O’Neill’s autobiographical character.

The play had hit Kate hard. It was about a Connecticut family so full of love for each other yet tormented with addiction and sinking with secrets. Mary was a morphine addict, James a liar, Jamie an alcoholic, Edmund dying of consumption. She’d thought of her own family, of how happy she had thought they were. In some ways, they were completely different from the Tyrones. Her family didn’t suffer from addiction or alcoholism. No one had a fatal disease. Instead of two sons, there were two daughters.

Her father had not been a drunk, but he had been a liar and a cheat. He had acted the role of good husband and father but was actually a different person entirely.

When they saw the play, her mother had been dead barely a year. It was only in retrospect, after her mother’s death and father’s imprisonment, after Beth’s retreat from closeness, and after Kate’s own heart became concretized, that she realized how her father’s secrets had destroyed them. He had had a private life unknown to the family.

He was so charming. Even Kate was charmed by him, only back then she had called it love. She had adored her dad—he could do no wrong. Even though he stayed out lots of nights, and her mother seemed upset about it, Kate figured he deserved to have fun. He worked hard at the gallery that had belonged to her mother and grandmother, built it into an even more successful business because of all the collectors he befriended. Everyone wanted him to like them.

He loved to gamble. Even on family vacations, they would often go to places that had casinos—like the trip to Monte Carlo the summer Kate was thirteen. The excuse had been to visit the Jean Cocteau murals in Villefranche-sur-Mer, to stay in Saint Paul de Vence, the medieval village above Nice, and to dine at La Colombe d’Or. Legend had it that artists had paid for their meals with paintings. The walls were hung
with art by Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Chagall. But the way her father had driven them back to the auberge; kissed them all good night, saying it was “for luck”; and left for the rest of the night, Kate knew he was speeding back to the casino.

“What’s he doing there?” Kate asked her mother.

“He enjoys games,” her mother said.

“What kind of games?” Kate asked.

Her mother laughed. “Why don’t you ask him that?”

So Kate did when he returned late the next morning. “Why would you rather play roulette than stay at the hotel with us?”

Her father chuckled. “Wait till you’re older. You’ll see James Bond movies and get it.” Then, just as the rest of the family was heading to Èze for lunch, he went to bed to sleep through the day.

One late night during school vacation,
Dr. No
was on TV, and Kate made Lulu stay over and watch it with her. James was playing baccarat at a casino. He wore a dinner jacket and looked handsome, just like her father. Kate tried to imagine what her father had been trying to say, but to her, hanging out in a casino seemed boring.

Living in Connecticut, temptation was close for him—Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos were not far from Black Hall. But instead of just being away from dinner till dawn, he had started not coming home for days at a time. One day he came home just before she left for school. He hugged her, and she smelled perfume. She was only fifteen at the time, but she knew right then that he was having an affair.

She wanted to tell Beth, but Kate took her position as older sister seriously and had to protect her. She watched her mother, to see how she reacted. For the longest time, her mother seemed fine. But once in a while, her father would talk on the phone in a low voice, then leave the house. Kate would see her mother hitting redial after her father left.

Kate figured her mother must have smelled the perfume too.

Walking down Pequot Avenue, Kate had intended to keep going to the lighthouse. But when she stopped to sit on the wall outside
Monte Cristo Cottage, she realized this was where she had wanted to come all along. She needed to visit this house, to feel Eugene O’Neill’s spirit and bring back a moment in her life when she had sat with Beth and Mathilda in the theater, when a certain truth about her father had clicked in her mind.

Her phone rang again. This time she answered without even looking at the screen.

“You didn’t even text me back. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell me,” Kate said.

“You have no idea how much I wanted to,” Lulu said.

“But Beth made you promise not to?”

“No, she never said that. I can’t even figure it out, why I didn’t. At first I thought that, yes—that if she’d wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”

“Am I that terrible?” she asked. “That judgmental?”

Lulu studiously avoided answering the question. “Kate, I want to see you. We need to talk in person.”

Kate’s jaw was so tight she could barely speak.

“Where is Jed Hilliard now?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Kate, we weren’t friends. I only met him once—accidentally.”

“Where?”

“On the Block Island Ferry. It was late last winter; the boat was practically empty. I had a few days off and was heading out to clear my head. I spotted Beth standing on deck—I was in the cabin; it was so cold. I remember there was ice on the lines, and it was starting to snow. I was so surprised to see her there at all—I started to go outside, when a guy walked up to her, handed her a cup of something hot—coffee, I guess. I tried to hang back, but she saw me, so I couldn’t avoid going over to talk. She introduced him as an artist friend, said they were going
to go to Mohegan Bluffs to take photos of the cliffs in the snow so they could paint the scene later.”